Ivan Hewett's Classic 50 No 30: John Cage - Sonata no 5

The latest in Ivan Hewett's 50-part series on short works by the
world's greatest composers.

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Long before he wrote that infamous “silent” piece4'33", John Cage composed something that is as close to an old-fashioned masterpiece as he ever got. It’s called Sonatas and Interludes.

The very idea that Cage might have composed proper written-out music, let alone a masterpiece, will astonish many people. In fact his instinct for order and structure was just as strong as his urge towards joyous anarchy. They were different routes to the same desirable thing: the extinction of personality and the attainment of a state of tranquillity.

The Sonatas and Interludes were composed between 1946 and 1948, when Cage’s instinct for order was uppermost. They’re written for piano, but this is no ordinary piano. Some notes buzz like an African thumb-piano, some make a dull metallic thud, others ping delightfully like a toy piano, or clang like a bell. And every now and then an ordinary piano note sticks out, which somehow magnifies the music’s extra-terrestrial weirdness and charm.

This is the sound of the prepared piano, which was Cage’s own invention. Finding himself bereft one day of his beloved percussion instruments, he did something that only the stubbornness and naivety of genius could conceive. He took the only instrument to hand – an upright piano – and turned it into a percussion orchestra, by placing small objects between its strings to alter the sound.

In that first piece of 1938, the “preparation” is fairly rough-and-ready. In Sonatas and Interludes it’s enormously sophisticated, with the position of each bolt or piece of rubber specified to a fraction of an inch. The layout of the piece is equally subtle. Nearly all the pieces are based on a pattern of two repeating sections made famous by Scarlatti in his sonatas (as featured in No 2 of this series). But unlike Scarlatti, Cage fills basic form with a subtle play of numerical proportions, which determine everything from individual phrases to the length of sections.

As if that weren’t enough, each sonata is linked to one of the eight Permanent Emotions of ancient Indian thought, which Cage was deeply influenced by at the time. They are the four “white” emotions humour, wonder, the erotic, and the heroic, and the four “black”: anger, fear, disgust, and sorrow. Which emotion attaches to which sonata is anyone’s guess. The pieces are as hard to read as those Indian temple dances where the guide-book tells us the god is angry, but what we see is elegant self-possessed gesture. Emotion here isn’t a state of feeling, it’s a correct way of comporting oneself towards the world. Cage’s pieces have that same quality.

LISTENING POINTS

00.00 The dancing stream of quavers in this piece, delicately played by Alec Karis, perhaps evoke the Joyous. The proportional scheme is 2 : 2 : 2.5 : 2.5, making a unit of nine bars. That’s the length of this opening section.

0.25 This whole A section is repeated, making a first “half” of 52 seconds. Notice how the regular rhythms are upset as the section proceeds (Cage didn’t want to make it too easy for us to count out his patterns). We’ve now heard the two sections corresponding to 2 : 2 in the pattern.

00.49 Now the B section begins. This corresponds to the 2.5 part of the pattern, so it’s just touch a longer than the A section.

1.18 The B section is repeated. Notice how the chord at the very end sounds oddly familiar. That’s because it’s a common-or-garden major chord. This is an example of how modern music strips away the context for familiar things, so they sound strange.

FURTHER LISTENING

John Cage: Sonata 10 from Sonatas and Interludes

Although the moods of the sonatas are mysterious, they’re not entirely inscrutable. This one has a wonderful combination of grandeur and delicacy. If I had to make a guess at a Permanent Emotion it embodies, it would be the Heroic. It’s one of the few sonatas that doesn’t obey the AABB form-scheme. There’s a beautiful final C section, beginning at 3.34.

John Cage: Amores Movt 3

Cage was deeply upset by the Second World War, finding it “huge and hideous”. “Logically,” he wrote, “I thought that anything that is small and intimate, and has some love in it, is beautiful. Therefore I wrote a piece for prepared piano, which is very quiet. It is called Amores, and it is about my conviction that love is something that we can consider beautiful.” Later he added another movement, and between them placed two movements for percussion. The second of these is composed for “seven wood-blocks, not Chinese”.

John Cage: The Wonderful Widow of 18 Springs

This is many people’s desert island Cage piece. It sets some words from one of his favourite books, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The singer’s simple, haunting line is accompanied by a pianist, who never plays a single note, instead tapping out a percussion part on the piano lid. It's sung here by the great Cathy Berberian.